Calculators & Tools

American Heritage (free)
Begun in 2007, the National Portal is a massive, multiyear project to provide information on 4,000 historical sites, including easily searchable online access to digital images and descriptions of millions of artifacts housed in the collections of American museums, historical societies, National Parks, and other institutions across the country

Ancestry.com ($/some free)
The world's largest online resource for family history documents and family trees.

Archive.org (free)
A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.  Like a paper library, provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

Archives.com ($)
Archives.com gives you access to over 1.1 billion digital records and is adding approximately 50,000 new records to our Collections every day! Data sources are checked for quality & accuracy.

Books We Own (free)
Books We Own is a list of resources owned/accessed by individuals who are willing to look up genealogical information and e-mail or snail mail it to others who request it. This is a free service - volunteers may ask for reimbursement of copies and postage if information is provided via snail-mail. The project began in 1996 as a way for members of the ROOTS-L mailing list to share their resources with one another. Today, there are over 2000 volunteers.

Canadian Genealogy Centre (free)
The LAC collection of Canadian documentary heritage provides genealogists with resources - the photographs, maps, letters, diaries, maps, music, portraits and other documents - to acquire and understand a family's history in the context of Canada's development.

American Life Histories (free)
These life histories were compiled and transcribed by the staff of the Folklore Project of the Federal Writers' Project for the U.S. Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) from 1936-1940. The Library of Congress collection includes 2,900 documents representing the work of over 300 writers from 24 states. Typically 2,000-15,000 words in length, the documents consist of drafts and revisions, varying in form from narrative to dialogue to report to case history. The histories describe the informant's family education, income, occupation, political views, religion and mores, medical needs, diet and miscellaneous observations. Pseudonyms are often substituted for individuals and places named in the narrative texts. 

American Women's History (free)
American Women's History provides citations to print and Internet reference sources, as well as to selected large primary source collections. The guide also provides information about the tools researchers can use to find additional books, articles, dissertations, and primary sources.